Executive producer of Kanye West’s Yeezus, Rick Rubin and Mike Dean continue to handle press in place of Kanye for the new album. Rick has done a new interview with The Daily Beast where he discusses working on the album, how Kanye involved him, the creative process behind it, difficulty in finishing up the album on a short notice and even possibility of a sequel to the album.

How did you come to work on Yeezus?

Kanye called me. I’d just finished working at the studio for about two months on another album, and I was getting ready to go away on vacation for a couple weeks. Then he called up and said, “Can I just come play my album?” And I said, “Sure.” I always like to hear what he’s working on. So he came over to my house in Malibu. We listened. I thought I was going to hear a finished album, but actually we listened to probably three and a half hours of works in progress.

What did the album sound like at that point?

Kind of meandering, unfocused, usually without his vocals. I assumed that the album was scheduled to come out next year. So I said, “When are you thinking of finishing up?” And he said, “It’s coming out in five weeks.” Like completely confident and fine.

When he came to you with the record, did you have a sense of what needed to be done?

Initially, he thought there were going to be 16 songs on the album. But that first day, before he even asked me to work on it, I said, “Maybe you should make it more concise. Maybe this is two albums. Maybe this is just the first half.” That was one of the first breakthroughs. Kanye was like, “That’s what I came here today to hear! It could be 10 songs!”